A Texas State Representative had his tweet censored by Twitter tonight after Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke started crying online about a perfectly legal tweet that doesn’t appear to be violating any of Twitter’s public-facing rules.

This all started when Beto decided to post an edgy tweet for all of the uninformed teens on Twitter who follow him to spread like wildfire. After all, it’s hip and cool to tell voters that as President you’re going to violate their 2nd and 4th Amendment rights by unlawfully taking their firearms. He even started shilling shirts mirroring the original tweet “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15” after it started going viral.

In response, Texas State Representative Briscoe Cain quote tweeted Beto and said “My AR is ready for you Robert Francis.” This prompted Beto to screenshot the tweet and make a post claiming that the tweet was a “death threat.” It’s almost as if he knew beforehand that Twitter was going to censor the tweet after he brought attention to it.

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This is a death threat, Representative. Clearly, you shouldn't own an AR-15—and neither should anyone else. pic.twitter.com/jsiZmwjMDs

This of course is not a death threat by any measure. Brandenburg v. Ohio, (1969) says that government cannot constitutionally punish abstract advocacy of force or law violation unless it is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action.

Given the context of Beto’s tweet that is being quoted, the Representative from Texas could have meant any number of things. Perhaps he meant his AR was ready to be picked up by Beto. Perhaps he meant something else. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that what he said is constitutionally protect free speech and not an imminent or direct threat that is likely to result in lawless action. You don’t need to be a lawyer to see this.

The tweet also doesn’t appear to break any of Twitter’s rules, or at least one would think. Twitter’s violent threat policy is very specific about what a threat is and what it isn’t.

What is in violation of this policy?

Under this policy, you can’t state an intention to inflict violence on a specific person or group of people. We define intent to include statements like “I will”, “I’m going to”, or “I plan to”, as well as conditional statements like “If you do X, I will”. Violations of this policy include, but are not limited to:

threatening to kill someone;

threatening to sexually assault someone;

threatening to seriously hurt someone and/or commit a other violent act that could lead to someone’s death or serious physical injury; and

asking for or offering a financial reward in exchange for inflicting violence on a specific person or group of people.

It appears Twitter’s moderation team didn’t read their own policy, because as of right now the Tweet has been removed and Representative Cain is likely locked out of his account and placed in Twitter timeout.

The lesson here is simple: if a Democrat cries on Twitter, your tweet is getting deleted and you’re getting put in timeout. Even if you’re a State Representative from Texas.

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We already know that Silicon Valley doesn’t support the first amendment. That much is obvious. Today we learn which companies don’t support the 2nd amendment while supporting dystopian “red flag” laws that can be used to seize your guns. You can find a convenient list of these tech companies and their executive below. Be sure to spread the word so everyone knows which companies to avoid.

In a direct and urgent call to address gun violence in America, the chief executives of some of the nation’s best-known companies sent a letter to Senate leaders on Thursday, urging an expansion of background checks to all firearms sales and stronger “red flag” laws.

“Doing nothing about America’s gun violence crisis is simply unacceptable and it is time to stand with the American public on gun safety,” the heads of 145 companies, including Levi Strauss, Twitter and Uber, say in the letter, which was shared with The New York Times.

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The letter — which urges the Republican-controlled Senate to enact bills already introduced in the Democrat-led House of Representatives — is the most concerted effort by the business community to enter the gun debate, one of the most polarizing issues in the nation and one that was long considered off limits.

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Facebook has suspended the automated chat function of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for 24 hours because of what they claim to be a violation of their “hate speech” policy. Whether you agree or not with what the chat system was saying is irrelevant. What it’s important here is that Facebook, a single American company, has the power to silence world leaders at the push of a button. It’s not just “trolls” they are silencing and controlling, it is also government officials from around the world.

These are scary times. We need to make a choice as a global internet community. Are we going to allow a handful of companies in Silicon Valley to dictate what we can talk about on the internet, what links we can share, and what information we can find? That’s not a world I want to live it. Which is why at Gab we’ve been building products to help prevent that world from continuing to grow stronger.

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Facebook said on Thursday that the social network had suspended for 24 hours the page’s bot, or automated chat function.

The page had called on voters to prevent the establishment of a government composed of “Arabs who want to destroy us all — women, children and men.” The post sparked uproar by opposition politicians.

Netanyahu denied he wrote the post in an interview with Kan Reshet Bet radio. He said it was a staffer’s mistake and the post was removed.

Netanyahu is fighting for his political survival ahead of elections next week and has been shoring up nationalist voters with feisty language and hard-line promises.

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Today in the clown world that is Washington DC, Senators Hawley, Cruz, Braun, and Cramer sent a strongly-worded letter to Facebook about their bias and censorship aimed at conservatives.

I’m sure Mark Zuckerberg is shaking in his hoodie.

Conservative politicians are useless and clueless. They conserve nothing, accomplish nothing, and build nothing. I say this as an actual conservative. As someone who has risked everything and dedicated his life to actually conserve the freedom of speech for all people on the internet.

I say this as someone who has actually built something instead of sitting on Twitter whining about Silicon Valley’s bias and doing absolutely nothing to stop it. The problem of Big Tech censorship and tyranny has been ongoing for several years now and Gab has been not only talking about it, but we’ve been building solutions to it. I don’t want conservative politicians to be clueless idiots, but it’s the reality of the situation. I say this from a place of love. Love of freedom. Love of country. Love of the internet.

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A strongly worded letter from uncle Ted Cruz isn’t going to accomplish anything. Facebook will do nothing. The bias and censorship won’t change or stop and in fact it’s going to keep getting worse as 2020 approaches. The brilliant elected officials in Congress twiddle their thumbs writing dopey letters, tweeting their outrage on the big tech platforms they are outraged about, and drafting moronic legislation that would destroy the internet as we know it. Meanwhile Gab is actually building. Building a social network, a web browser, an internet-wide comment system, an email service, and even our own ISP.

BREAKING: Senators Hawley, Cruz, Braun and Cramer have sent a letter to @Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg condemning the censorship of Live Action, and demanding an immediate correction. pic.twitter.com/DCFN3dDHz6

Government isn’t the solution. It never has been. It never will be. These people are incompetent and sold to the highest bidder. Most of them have never built anything. They are career politicians who know the right thing to say to get elected. That’s about all they are good for.

The solution is to build. No one is going to save us from Silicon Valley’s tyranny. We need to save ourselves. I’ve been saying this, and actually living it, for three years now.

I’ll repeat it for as long as it takes to sink in.

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The Trump campaign is launching a “social networking” app built for the sole purpose of tracking voters and collecting data on them. Many people are going to be upset with me for writing this, but this is the reality of the situation. It’s a smart play for the Trump campaign. Why pay Facebook and Google for access to information and voters when you can simply collect that information yourself? Most Trump voters also probably won’t have a problem with this.

The app sounds nothing like a “social networking” app, but that’s how the campaign–or at least the press–is positioning it. It doesn’t look like there will be any user generated content whatsoever, but I could be wrong. If there is you can bet the app will be swarmed with activists pretending to be “nazis” and all sorts of nonsense in an attempt to get the app banned from the app stores or simply create more work for the campaign and give the media some bait.

For now it sounds like more like a glorified campaign schedule, white house press release, feed of Trump’s tweets, a donate button, and a way to track voters on their mobile devices.

I’ll be “monitoring the situation” to see how this app develops.

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The Trump reelection campaign is launching a social networking app to harness the fervent energy among his legion of supporters,Politico reported. The smartphone app, which has no release date set, will encourage them to donate, volunteer their time and stay on top of the president’s campaign schedule.

“Trump supporters are more dedicated and committed,” Rory McShane, a Republican strategist specializing in digital media, told Politico. “If there is any campaign where they have a shot at making this work, it’s the Trump campaign.”

The app — which has no release date set — will create a prize system to persuade Trump’s diehard supporters to recruit their friends with rewards such as VIP seats at a rally or a photo with the president, similar to how other campaigns do for top donors, the report said.

And it will allow the Trump campaign to track followers more extensively than ever before, providing another way to double down and turn out the conservative base instead of persuading independent and undecided voters to reelect the president. The campaign has already collected 200 million voter files from the Republican National Committee, and it’s aiming to target voters with hyperspecific messaging.

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Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, the Trump campaign is building a digital operation unrivaled by Democrats in its use of data-mining techniques and algorithms, the Los Angeles Timesreported in June. It has spent millions in small Facebook ad buys to reach a large swath of voters in key battleground states.

The app highlights a key part of the Trump campaign strategy, which is anchored in circumventing tech companies like Facebook and Twitter that the president has assailed as biased against conservatives.

At a “White House “Social Media Summit” in July — which critics denounced as giving a platform to incendiary voices — Trump accused them of “terrible bias” and silencing his supporters. Digital companies deny shutting down conservative points of view over others.

Back in 2016, the Trump campaign had a bare-bones app that limited its functions to campaign updates and canvassing information. It had 120,000 registered users, according to Politico.

The campaign increasingly views smartphones as another method of turning passive supporters into staunch activists. At a Trump rally late last year, campaign manager Brad Parscale brandished his iPhone, telling supporters, “Now this phone is how we connect with you. It’s how we turn you into the army of Trump.”

Digital experts say a key hurdle in launching an app is getting users to download it to begin with, which has doomed plenty of others. But as elections are increasingly fought online, the app space offers campaigns another method of reaching supporters.

“The big challenge for campaigns in the current era we’re in — when attention is oversaturated — is to reach people where they are,” veteran GOP strategist Eric Wilson told Politico. “It’s a no-brainer to go into the app space on campaigns. It’s an important battleground.”

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Any app you use that allows you to connect with your Facebook account runs the risk of passing any information they have back to Facebook. Case in point: two apps that track menstruation were allegedly sharing details about users’ sex life with Facebook and other entities according to a report from privacy watchdog Privacy International.

This should come as now surprise. Third-party apps like “quizzes” and other such nonsense are massive data collection honeypots. Stop using them. Go into your Facebook settings and revoke access to your account from third-party apps. You’ll likely be surprised by just how many apps have constant access to your Facebook account data. Better yet: delete Facebook.

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The report raises new fears at a time when consumers are becoming more educated about how their private information is bought, sold, scraped and used to target them, discriminate against them or sell them on some new gadget.

According to Privacy International, the information was shared with the Mark Zuckerberg-led company via Facebook’s Software Development Kit, which is a product that empowers developers to create apps for specific operating systems, keep track of analytics and monetize their apps with Facebook’s vast advertising network.

The privacy watchdog group found that the two apps, known as Maya and MIA Fem, began sharing data with Facebook as soon as users installed them on their phones — even before any privacy policy was signed. BuzzFeed first reported about the two apps.

A Facebook spokesman pushed back on the news outlet’s reporting.

“Contrary to BuzzFeed’s reporting, our terms of service prohibit developers from sending us sensitive health information and we enforce against them when we learn they are. In addition, ad targeting based on people’s interests does not leverage information gleaned from people’s activity across other apps or websites,” Joe Osborne, a Facebook rep, told Fox News via email on Tuesday.

Facebook told the report’s authors that it has contacted both apps to notify them about a possible violation of its terms of service.

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Although period and pregnancy-tracking apps are apparently becoming more popular, many are not subject to the same rules as those governing regular medical data — raising a host of privacy fears.

Some of these apps have been slammed for sharing data with women’s employers and insurance companies, according to The Washington Post, while others have been scrutinized over security flaws.

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“Hate speech” is a subjective term that is used to silence dissent, criticism, and politically incorrect opinions and information. The Supreme Court of The United States ruled unanimously, that “hate speech” is free speech. Our tech overlords in Silicon Valley don’t see things that same way. Their supreme rulers use “hate speech” to silence political dissidents, stifle market competition, and prevent uncomfortable truths from surfacing on the normie web.

A company called Hatebase–based in Canada–is using their technology and human input to help governments, tech companies, academics and more to detect “hate speech.” “Hate speech” is subjective. Those in power decide what it is and how to police it. Hatebase admits this. Ironically their biggest source of “hate speech” is Twitter. Yet you’ll still find Twitter on both App Stores, while Gab’s apps have been banned for–you guessed it: “hate speech.”

Their database of “hate speech” words is also hilarious and shows why this type of approach to policing content online is a joke. It includes terms like “banana” and “tiger.”

Policing hate speech is something nearly every online communication platform struggles with. Because to police it, you must detect it; and to detect it, you must understand it. Hatebase is a company that has made understanding hate speech its primary mission, and it provides that understanding as a service — an increasingly valuable one.

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Essentially Hatebase analyzes language use on the web, structures and contextualizes the resulting data, and sells (or provides) the resulting database to companies and researchers that don’t have the expertise to do this themselves.

The Canadian company, a small but growing operation, emerged out of research at the Sentinel Project into predicting and preventing atrocities based on analyzing the language used in a conflict-ridden region.

“What Sentinel discovered was that hate speech tends to precede escalation of these conflicts,” explained Timothy Quinn, founder and CEO of Hatebase. “I partnered with them to build Hatebase as a pilot project — basically a lexicon of multilingual hate speech. What surprised us was that a lot of other NGOs [non-governmental organizations] started using our data for the same purpose. Then we started getting a lot of commercial entities using our data. So last year we decided to spin it out as a startup.”

You might be thinking, “what’s so hard about detecting a handful ethnic slurs and hateful phrases?” And sure, anyone can tell you (perhaps reluctantly) the most common slurs and offensive things to say — in their language… that they know of. There’s much more to hate speech than just a couple ugly words. It’s an entire genre of slang, and the slang of a single language would fill a dictionary. What about the slang of all languages?

A shifting lexicon

As Victor Hugo pointed out in Les Miserables, slang (or “argot” in French) is the most mutable part of any language. These words can be “solitary, barbarous, sometimes hideous words… Argot, being the idiom of corruption, is easily corrupted. Moreover, as it always seeks disguise so soon as it perceives it is understood, it transforms itself.”

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Not only is slang and hate speech voluminous, but it is ever-shifting. So the task of cataloguing it is a continuous one.

Hatebase uses a combination of human and automated processes to scrape the public web for uses of hate-related terms. “We go out to a bunch of sources — the biggest, as you might imagine, is Twitter — and we pull it all in and turn it over to Hatebrain. It’s a natural language program that goes through the post and returns true, false, or unknown.”

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True means it’s pretty sure it’s hate speech — as you can imagine, there are plenty of examples of this. False means no, of course. And unknown means it can’t be sure; perhaps it’s sarcasm, or academic chatter about a phrase, or someone using a word who belongs to the group and is attempting to reclaim it or rebuke others who use it. Those are the values that go out via the API, and users can choose to look up more information or context in the larger database, including location, frequency, level of offensiveness, and so on. With that kind of data you can understand global trends, correlate activity with other events, or simply keep abreast of the fast-moving world of ethnic slurs.

Hate speech being flagged all around the world — these were a handful detected today, along with the latitude and longitude of the IP they came from.

Quinn doesn’t pretend the process is magical or perfect, though. “There are very few 100 percents coming out of Hatebrain,” he explained. “It varies a little from the machine learning approach others use. ML is great when you have an unambiguous training set, but with human speech, and hate speech, which can be so nuanced, that’s when you get bias floating in. We just don’t have a massive corpus of hate speech, because no one can agree on what hate speech is.”

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That’s part of the problem faced by companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook — you can’t automate what can’t be automatically understood.

Fortunately Hatebrain also employs human intelligence, in the form of a corps of volunteers and partners who authenticate, adjudicate, and aggregate the more ambiguous data points.

“We have a bunch of NGOs that partner with us in linguistically diverse regions around the world, and we just launched our ‘citizen linguists’ program, which is a volunteer arm of our company, and they’re constantly updating and approving and cleaning up definitions,” Quinn said. “We place a high degree of authenticity on the data they provide us.”

That local perspective can be crucial for understanding the context of a word. He gave the example of a word in Nigeria, which when used between members of one group means friend, but when used by that group to refer to someone else means uneducated. It’s unlikely anyone but a Nigerian would be able to tell you that. Currently Hatebase covers 95 languages in 200 countries, and they’re adding to that all the time.

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Furthermore there are “intensifiers,” words or phrases that are not offensive on their own but serve to indicate whether someone is emphasizing the slur or phrase. Other factors enter into it too, some of which a natural language engine may not be able to recognize because it has so little data concerning them. So in addition to keeping definitions up to date, the team is also constantly working on improving the parameters used to categorize speech Hatebrain encounters.

Building a better database for science and profit

The system just ingested its millionth hate speech sighting (out of perhaps tens times that many phrases evaluated), which sounds simultaneously like a lot and a little. It’s a little because the volume of speech on the internet is so vast that one rather expects even the tiny proportion of it constituting hate speech to add up to millions and millions.

But it’s a lot because no one else has put together a database of this size and quality. A vetted, million-data-point set of words and phrases classified as hate speech or not hate speech is a valuable commodity all on its own. That’s why Hatebase provides it for free to researchers and institutions using it for humanitarian or scientific purposes.

But companies and larger organizations looking to outsource hate speech detection for moderation purposes pay a license fee, which keeps the lights on and allows the free tier to exist.

“We’ve got, I think, four of the world’s ten largest social networks pulling our data. We’ve got the UN pulling data, NGOs, the hyper local ones working in conflict areas. We’ve been pulling data for the LAPD for the last couple years. And we’re increasingly talking to government departments,” Quinn said.

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They have a number of commercial clients, many of which are under NDA, Quinn noted, but the most recent to join up did so publicly, and that’s TikTok. As you can imagine, a popular platform like that has a great need for quick, accurate moderation.

In fact it’s something of a crisis, since there are laws coming into play that penalize companies enormous amounts if they don’t promptly remove offending content. That kind of threat really loosens the purse strings; If a fine could be in the tens of millions of dollars, paying a significant fraction of that for a service like Hatebase’s is a good investment.

“These big online ecosystems need to get this stuff off their platforms, and they need to automate a certain percentage of their content moderation,” Quinn said. “We don’t ever think we’ll be able to get rid of human moderation, that’s a ridiculous and unachievable goal; What we want to do is help automation that’s already in place. It’s increasingly unrealistic that every online community under the sun is going to build up their own massive database of multilingual hate speech, their own AI. The same way companies don’t have their own mail server any more, they use Gmail, or they don’t have server rooms, they use AWS — that’s our model, we call ourselves hate speech as a service. About half of us love that term, half don’t, but that really is our model.”

Hatebase’s commercial clients have made the company profitable from day one, but they’re “not rolling in cash by any means.”

“We were nonprofit until we spun out, and we’re not walking away from that, but we wanted to be self-funding,” Quinn said. Relying on the kindness of rich strangers is no way to stay in business, after all. The company is hiring and investing in its infrastructure, but Quinn indicated that they’re not looking to juice growth or anything — just make sure the jobs that need doing have someone to do them.

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In the meantime it seems clear to Quinn and everyone else that this kind of information has real value, though it’s rarely simple.

“It’s a really, it’s a really complicated problem. We always grapple with it, you know, in terms of, well, what role does hate speech play? What role does misinformation play? What role do socioeconomics play?” he said. “There’s a great paper that came out of the University of Warwick, they studied the correlation between hate speech and violence against immigrants in Germany over, I want to say, 2015 to 2017. They graph it out. And its peak for peak, you know, valid for Valley. It’s amazing. We don’t do a hell of a lot of analysis — we’re a data provider.”

“But now have like, almost 300 universities pulling the data, and they do those kinds of those kinds of analyses. So that’s very validating for us.”

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Dick Costolo, the former CEO of Twitter, told CNBC that he believes newspapers and other elitist organizations should have more influence and power on social media than a normal user. Newspapers, which regularly lie, print falsehoods, and make up “sources” to get a narrative out should have more power than a schmuck like you or I according to the tech elite.

The left doesn’t actually believe in a level playing field. They don’t support equality. What they support is control. Control of the narrative. Control over who is allowed to have a voice and who isn’t. Control over our data, our privacy, and control over our time.

“You have to start treating all these accounts differently,” Costolo said on “Halftime Report.” “You’ve got high authority accounts, like newspaper accounts … that may be allowed to tweet things that a user that just signed up yesterday and has zero followers shouldn’t.”

The thought of putting in such a policy on Twitter and other social media platforms likely would make their leaders “cringe,” Costolo said. But, in an era of widespread disinformation and harassment online, its time has come, Costolo said.

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For example, Costolo said an account that hasn’t provided a phone number and has no avatar shouldn’t be allowed to reply to tweets, or at least those replies should be visible only to their followers.

Costolo, who left Twitter in July 2015 after five years as CEO, mentioned a situation when he was still at the company in which ISIS and accounts affiliated with the terrorist group tweeted images from an execution it carried out.

Twitter decided to suspend accounts that shared the images, he said. But hours later, a newspaper tweeted out the front page of the following day’s paper, which included images from the ISIS execution.

“Well, now what do we do?” Costolo said in recounting the story.

“I just think these companies … have to start thinking about tiers of accounts,” said Costolo, who still owns shares of Twitter.

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Twitter has recently shown a willingness to differentiate among accounts, announcing in June a new feature that would label tweets from influential government officials who violate its content policies instead of taking the posts down.

The social media company didn’t single out President Donald Trump when it announced the move, but it came after criticism from users who wondered why tweets from Trump that appear to break Twitter’s rules are not removed.

Costolo didn’t address this new feature explicitly but said he wouldn’t regulate Trump’s tweets.

“I don’t think you can have a terms of service that says we treat every account equally,” Costolo said. “It causes these companies to have to jump through hoops and twist themselves into a pretzel, and you see that with the way people think about, ‘Well, Trump’s tweet XYZ didn’t really break this rule for this reason.’ I just think you should say we’re not going to do anything to the president of the United States’ account. He’s the president of the United States.”

Twitter and other social media companies such as Facebook have faced scrutiny over the way they regulate — or fail to regulate — content.

Critics argue the companies should do more to crack down on discriminatory and offensive content. Others believe the platforms should not be restrictive, and some argue they should apply the free speech standards of the First Amendment, which applies to how government entities regulate speech, not publicly traded companies.

In May, Facebook announced it was removing the accounts of high-profile figures including Louis Farrakhan, Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones and the website InfoWars, which frequently spreads conspiracy theories.

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Last year, Facebook and Twitter took down accounts tied to Iranian disinformation campaigns that sought to interfere in politics.

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In a surprise to no one, Apple was abusing their market power to place their own apps at the top of App Store search results. Apple and Google have a duopoly on mobile app distribution. They decide which developers can enter the mobile app market place and they also decide who can succeed in that marketplace. It’s rigged beyond belief and this is just one more example of their abuse of market power. The Department of Justice is currently investigating Big Tech companies for antitrust behavior. This is where their focus should be.

Top spots in App Store search results are some of the most fought over real estate in the online economy. The store generated more than $50 billion in sales last year, and the company said two-thirds of app downloads started with a search.

But as Apple has become one of the largest competitors on a platform that it controls, suspicions that the company has been tipping the scales in its own favor are at the heart of antitrust complaints in the United States, Europe and Russia.

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Apple’s apps have ranked first recently for at least 700 search terms in the store, according to a New York Times analysis of six years of search results compiled by Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. Some searches produced as many as 14 Apple apps before showing results from rivals, the analysis showed. (Though competitors could pay Apple to place ads above the Apple results.)

Presented with the results of the analysis, two senior Apple executives acknowledged in a recent interview that, for more than a year, the top results of many common searches in the iPhone App Store were packed with the company’s own apps. That was the case even when the Apple apps were less relevant and less popular than ones from its competitors. The executives said the company had since adjusted the algorithm so that fewer of its own apps appeared at the top of search results.

The Times’s analysis of App Store data — which included rankings of more than 1,800 specific apps across 13 keywords since 2013 — illustrated the influence as well as the opacity of the algorithms that underpin tech companies’ platforms.

Those algorithms can help decide which apps are installed, which articles are read and which products are bought. But Apple and other tech giants like Facebook and Google will not explain in detail how such algorithms work — even when they blame the algorithm for problems.

Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president who oversees the App Store, and Eddy Cue, the senior vice president who oversees many of the Apple apps that benefited from the results, said there was nothing underhanded about the algorithm the company had built to display search results in the store.

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The executives said the company did not manually alter search results to benefit itself. Instead, they said, Apple apps generally rank higher than competitors because of their popularity and because their generic names are often a close match to broad search terms.

“There’s nothing about the way we run search in the App Store that’s designed or intended to drive Apple’s downloads of our own apps,” Mr. Schiller said. “We’ll present results based on what we think the user wants.”

Apple added its apps to the App Store in June 2016. Since then, it has been the top result for many popular search terms, according to the Sensor Tower data. Those Apple apps held on for years while top rivals remained stuck below, sometimes hundreds of spots down the list, the data shows.

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A Bit of History

I first became involved in social media back in the mid-1990s, before the term “social media” had even been coined. While the internet had been around a couple decades by then, the World Wide Web was still very new. When I set up my first web server back then there were 2,700 web servers in the whole world. Things were much simpler and the vast majority of web sites were composed of “static pages.” There was no interactivity. You navigated to the site and read the page and looked at the pictures. The pages were handcrafted; the authors wrote their own HTML code to format them.

I was working in healthcare informatics back then designing and prototyping what would become electronic health records (EHRs). When the World Wide Web came along I realized that it would be the ideal set of technologies to build these systems and set about teaching myself how it worked and experimenting with how to build what we now call “Web Apps” that would allow doctors to record information online via the web. This is commonplace now, but we had to invent it back in the ’90s. Looking for a simple application that I could build to get started with online text entry and subsequent viewing from other locations – the essence of an EHR – I decided to build a “chat room.”

I had seen and participated in other chat rooms that I had come across, so I understood their basic functionality, and even had some ideas of how to improve them so I set about searching for source code to see how they had been built. (Almost everything on the web was open source back then.) They had essentially all been built in a language called Perl and ran on Linux servers. That posed a bit of a problem for me as my Server was a Macintosh (before Macs were Unix) and there was no Perl for Macs. I persevered and extended a system called HyperCard, with which I had been building EHR prototypes for some time, and launched my chat room.

It turns out to have been the first such application to run on Mac web servers, and was also the first web app to convert text smilies like into graphical emoticons. My chat room software had another unique (at the time) feature I called “whisper” that let you send a private message to another user within the chat. My open source chat software was even published on the CD ROM that accompanied a book on building web sites at the time.¹

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By today’s standards my little chat room was very primitive. But after posting a link to it in another open chat room people started showing up and soon we had a few dozen “regulars” who would pop in to chat almost every day. A strange thing happened at that point. My software became a community. It was then that I realized that the World Wide Web was about to change – from a document distribution system to an interpersonal communication tool.

Virtually all of the problems and benefits of such an open social media system with which we are familiar today quickly manifested themselves, albeit on a smaller scale. I had one “rule” for my chat room and that was “be polite.” Beyond that anything was allowed. And yet we had trolls, who either in the open chat or via whispers would harass users. I ended up having to manually block the worst of these when they would not heed my warnings. It wasn’t all negative, of course, and I also developed a life-long collegial friendship with one of the chatters.

Then as now, as the creator and administrator of the site I had access to information that most users do not realize is inevitable from the way such software works. For example, I could if I chose to, read other users’ private whispers. (I did not, unless asked to re: harassment.) I could determine users’ physical location via their IP addresses as this was before VPNs. Normally there was no reason to, but on one occasion we had a chatter who was threatening suicide. While keeping her online chatting I traced her to her university, contacted their campus safety department, and helped them locate which lab she was in. She did indeed have a history and risk of suicide and we saved her that day. It was a harrowing couple of hours, I can tell you.

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Because maintaining and moderating became too time consuming and I had learned all that I wanted from developing the chat, I eventually shut it down. In the years since I have built many other web sites and apps, and software that makes it easier for developers to build their own social media sites. We have had to deal with issues of scalability far beyond the couple dozen users of those days, and levels of trolling, hacking, and denial of service which were unimaginable then. Despite this, the basics of human nature in an online community are the same today as they were then. Most people are good, and want to build communities together online. They want to be able to express themselves freely. And control how public or private their communications are.

While the vast majority of social media users today are good kind people, the trolling has become institutionalized and weaponized. Hoards of bots and users intent on destroying a community can and are deployed quickly on the battlefield of public discourse. Distributed Denial of Service (DDS) attacks are so commonplace that several large businesses have arisen to protect sites from it. And web sites face a daily barrage of hacking attempts bent on taking down sites, stealing user data, and otherwise destroying their enterprise. Frankly the amount of effort involved in fighting this tech destruction industry has stopped me on several occasions from deploying large-scale web presences. While I have several ideas and prototypes in my portfolio, the amount of effort involved to deploy such systems today is herculean and expensive. And well beyond what is possible in my spare time. (Perhaps I will reconsider after I retire next year.)

In closing, I would like to ask for you to not take Gab and its creators for granted. Having walked their path I can assure you that it is much harder and more work than it looks like.

Dr. Vullo (@vullo) is a professor in the newly created School of Information (formerly the Department of Information Sciences and Technologies) at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and creator of the Minor in Web Design and Development. He has extensive experience in the areas of web development, information sciences, and education, as well as medical informatics, dental informatics and education application development. Vullo is the creator and primary developer of Molly, a PHP web framework for the server-side development of virtual communities, electronic health record components, mobile web apps, distance learning tools, online communities, and myriad other web applications and services. Dr. Vullo’s current research is in Alternate Realities applications development.

Gab is fully supported by people like you. Please help us on our mission to defend free expression online for all people and decentralize control of the internet away from Silicon Valley. You can do this by purchasing a VPN from one of our affiliate partners. You’ll protect your own privacy and support Gab in the process.